"Hey--Pulpy! Your mother was a loose-leaf binder!"The lamest mother insult ever; uttered by Creeper in Brave & Bold #178 (1981). Even if we gave you the context, it wouldn't make it any better.

November 12, 2007

The Brave and the Bold 85 (1969)

Today’s entry is a gap-filler in my recently concluded indexing run through the stories in the original run of The Brave & The Bold. When I was re-shelving the Showcase: Green Arrow collection, which I had used in my Adventure Comics indexing, I realized that there are three Brave & Bold stories featuring Green Arrow reprinted in the back of the volume. Two of them, Brave & Bold 50 and Brave & Bold 71, I’ve already covered as I own the originals. But the final one reprinted is one I do not own.

The Brave and the Bold 85, “The Senator’s Been Shot!” by Bob Haney and Neal Adams is a classic story that also bears a distinction that, to my knowledge, no other comic book story can make. It has been turned into a musical.

That’s right. Then South Milwaukee, Wisconsin residents, Damien Kratt (no Google result) and Stephen Mayeshiba (one Google result from 1994), wrote a musical version of this story shortly after it was published. And it was broadcast and taped. Somewhere a version must still exist. If you aren’t dying to see this slice of heaven, then you need to reexamine your life’s priorities. I can just picture the baritone of Bruce Wayne harmonizing "Senator Wayne present and voting, sir! And I vote...yes!" with that "yes" lasting for a good 30 seconds without the singer drawing a breath.

I charge each and every person reading this to keep your eyes out for these two geniuses and, if encountered, beg them for a YouTube video of the musical version. One of you must know someone who knows someone who knows one of them.

And, if you can’t find them, I urge you to spend your time adapting other classic comic book stories into musicals. Even if you can’t write your own music, think of using established songs to tell the story. Picture Detroit JLA set to a mishmash of 1980’s hair metal, a Vertigo title done Avenue Q style, or Punisher to the soundtrack of the Indigo Girls. The possibilities are awesomely awesome.

Turning my attention back to the story at hand, Brave & Bold 85 is a Haney masterpiece involving the psychological question of whether a person can do more good in a regular role in society or as a masked vigilante.

This is the first story featuring the now signature facial hair on Green Arrow, but the focus starts on Bruce Wayne. The story opens with the assassination of a Senator who was to vote on a new anti-crime bill. After Batman gets pwned (I feel as though I am far too old to carry off using that term, but will you look at that – I tried to anyway) chasing the assassins by the old “get knocked off a car top by a low bridge” routine, Bruce Wayne learns the Senator, who is in a coma, wanted Bruce to step in as the new Senator should anything happen to the old one. Thus, Bruce Wayne has a dilemma. Can he do more good as Batman or as a Senator?

The reader then finds Oliver Queen considering giving up his career as Green Arrow because he feels he is doing so much good for humanity as a financier. Note well that Green Arrow would lose his fortune in his next appearance, which would be in Justice League of America 75 (1969). So much for the benevolent financier. Green Arrow has never been one for sticking with the same idea (or girl) for too long anyway.

The parallel stories intertwine nicely when Haney had both heroes reveal their dilemmas and secret identities to the psychiatrist son of the shot senator. That son is then kidnapped by the heavy of the piece, a gangster known as Mr. Minotaur, whose two claims to fame are that he, as could be expected, has a labyrinth for a hideout, and, instead of employing just unreliable human thugs, he also employs a bear, lion and warthog who work as a team to apply muscle on Mr. Minotaur’s foes.

And how cool is it that one of the animals is making a sound that is just like “Arrow”?

And speaking of cool parts of the story, there’s Oliver Queen’s helicopter which has Ollie’s named in giant letters plastered on the side. And then there’s Batman using a bat to help escape from the labyrinth. Or Green Arrow outwitting the villain by pulling on of those stunts like cops do on people with arrest warrants by inviting them to “free parties”.

And, because it is easy to understate how amazing an artist Adams is, here is another example of his amazing skill in depicting action.

Imagine the soundtrack for that scene. I'm thinking something along the lines of the theme music to Mannix.

Time for a friendly farewell. But it’s an unusual one, because the two heroes part ways with four pages still left in the tale. Thus, the friendly farewell is one between the heroes and the psychiatrist, who promptly hypnotizes himself to forget his knowledge of the heroes’ double identities and disappears into the void of the Haneyverse.